


Atlas

by Bargain Brand (ConstanceComment)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Mutual Pining, Requited Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:07:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22646140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/Bargain%20Brand
Summary: It’s not fair, but sometimes Gabriel says “I love you,” hoping Jack will understand he doesn’t mean “as a friend.”
Relationships: Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 9
Kudos: 76





	Atlas

**Author's Note:**

> This one originally was on twitter, in a shorter format. Now it's here, and slightly more fleshed out.

It’s not fair, but sometimes Gabriel says “I love you,” hoping Jack will understand he doesn’t mean “as a friend.”

Gabriel’s bi, but he was married to a woman. He has a child. He knows that Jack has had him filed away for years as “best friend — unavailable.”

And that’s fair. Gabriel can live with it. The timing has never been right for the two of them. Jack was with Vincent, or Gabriel was getting divorced. Clear as day, Gabriel remembers the exact moment Jack put him away, when instead of asking him out, Gabriel asked Jack to be his second in command in Adawe’s last ditch effort to save mankind. Jack’s smile had gone wobbly, his eyes tight and wet. “Save the world with me,” wasn’t the question Jack had been expecting. It happened again when after the war Gabriel asked him to “please, take the Strike Commander job, Jack, don’t let then turn me into an action figure,” instead of asking Jack to run away with him the way they both desperately wanted Gabriel to.

So that’s how its been for decades: Jack loving him and Gabriel knowing, Gabriel loving Jack and Jack not knowing. Because Jack can’t; it would break both of them to be that close and still so far.

Gabriel has put the whole world on Jack’s shoulders. He doesn’t need this burden too.

But sometimes, Gabriel still says it. He can’t help himself; Gabriel can keep this bound up inside his chest but not entirely. He needs the outlet like a safety valve on something high pressure and hot.

Jack brings him coffee during morning briefings and Gabriel moans “I love you” into the drink so they can both pretend he means the cup.

Jack smiles at him, lopsided and sweet and uncomfortable, because he wants and is not allowed to want, much less have. He chuckles low and brushes his gloved hands over Gabriel’s gloved hands, because that’s as close as Jack can bring himself to be. He’s like a well-loved book to Gabriel, wearing everything on his square-cut face, utterly transparent.

The youngest of seven brothers, when they made Jack, they cast him out of a mold. He’s been melted down many times to fit the shape he’s needed in, to the point where being needed at all has come to define him. It’s not that Jack forgets he can be a person; it’s clear from the way he stops holding himself so tightly spring-wound when they’re finally in private that Jack is always painfully aware of the next kind of weapon his body has become. It’s just that being his own person isn’t mission critical, like having reinforcements, or Gabriel loving him back.

Gabriel wants to scream the truth for everyone. For Jack, especially. Gabriel wants to take him by the back of the head and kiss him, to breathe the truth into Jack’s lungs because he does, he does love him. Gabriel loves him so much that it burns him, Jack’s love a flickering match that Gabriel keeps cupped in his hand to protect it from the wind.

It’s not like Gabriel doesn’t have options. He dreams about them often; retiring or faking his death and living in a cabin on a cliff, somewhere with no reporters and no cell signals where Jack could build them a house with a porch and a fence and kiss Gabriel shirtless under the trees and call him ‘Gabe,’ ‘angel.’

But that would require asking Jack to choose. His duty, or Gabriel. Whatever Jack picked would kill him. Gabriel knows that like he knows that the walls are closing in now on their family; Jack has never in his life shirked a responsibility. Power to Jack is just a lever with which to lift the world, and an obligation to do so. He could no more let go of that than he could let go of their friends and the home they built together. In a way, for Jack, the two are the same; Overwatch isn’t just a shield for the world, but the home they carved out together in the middle of an apocalypse.

Gabriel can’t ask Jack to choose. He won’t. He’s selfish, Gabriel knows that about himself, that he loves greedily and too much and too deeply. That he’s jealous and sarcastic and caustic and rude, that it kills him to see Jack unhappy, that he’d tear his own heart out if Jack asked to see what it looked like.

But Gabriel can’t bring himself to make Jack miserable for the rest of his life. Can’t bring himself, either, to ask Jack to flee with him from the sinking ship that Overwatch has become when Jack built this house for their family to live in.

He doesn’t know, deep down, if Jack would run.

So Gabriel hides, as much as he can bring himself to. He brushes his gloved hands over Jack’s gloved hands, because he won’t torment Jack with what he thinks he can’t have. 

Gabriel kills their enemies in the darkness so that Jack can be the golden champion Gabriel asked for. He sits by the coffins of their friends and colleagues, watching stress lines carve ever deeper into Jack’s aging face, wondering when it was that Jack stopped smiling so much. Gabriel visits Gérard in the hospital and can’t help but imagine it being Jack in that bed, lying still, heart slowing and god, stopping, because Gabriel put the target on his head when he asked Jack to put the world on his back.

“Be safe, Gabe,” Jack says when Gabriel gets on the plane the next day.

“Just for you, I’ll be home before nine.” Gabriel blows him a kiss, rolling his eyes from the gangway so Jack can awkwardly laugh and pretend it’s a joke.

Everything Gabriel does, he does for Jack. Even cruelly, Gabriel loves him. Because that’s what he's become; the one who does the cruel, awful, practical things so that Jack doesn't have to make those terrible choices. Jack would do his duty, always, but it would tear him in two.

So Gabriel removes the choices from his hands, and says “I love you” like a lie.


End file.
